The music critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler, aged forty-nine, has been thinking about music and memory for a very long time. Two decades back, during a brief tenure as a stringer for The New York Times, he described an afternoon spent visiting the violin virtuoso and Vienna native Fritz Kreisler in Woodlawn Cemetery, the bucolic four-hundred-acre necropolis in the Bronx. When he told his musician friends about it, he wrote, they looked at him “quizzically.” After all, Kreisler had been dead for nearly forty years. Heading home some 1,500 words later, the young time-traveler was contemplating parallels between notes in a musical score and gravestones as twin “portals of memory.”

That motif returns, writ large, in Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, Eichler’s first book.¹ Even his most generous colleagues must be feeling a twinge of envy at the accolades that instantly began raining down from Publisher’s Weekly, Yo-Yo Ma, Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise), Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes), and other panjandrums too numerous to list. Already, translations into German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Korean are in the works.

No, this isn’t another of those jargon-choked, radical-chic rants on diversity, equity, and inclusion that delusional music editors at academic presses make bold to launch as trade books. In his introduction, Eichler promises his reader “a book of stories, of sounds, and of places” that is “in some ways